Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Incompetence or All Part Of The Plan?

Yesterday I wrote:

Bottom line-the "Stimulus" is a bust and those "shovel ready" jobs are a myth. The administration threw 787 BILLION dollars in to the wind with no oversight and with no regard for the the taxpayers who ponied up the money. This is the same administration that wants us to trust them with our health care.

Tonight Pundette quotes Thomas Sowell:

Consider the "stimulus" legislation. Here the administration was successful
in rushing a massive spending bill through Congress in just two days-- after
which it sat on the President's desk for three days, while he was away on
vacation. But, like the medical care legislation, the "stimulus" legislation
takes effect slowly.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will be September
2010 before even three-quarters of the money will be spent. Some economists
expect that it will not all be spent by the end of 2010.

So here we are in the middle of a game of 'hurry up and wait', but to what end? Either the implementation of the Stimulus has been grossly incompetent OR the Stimulus was never meant to stimulate the economy. Here, Pundette quotes Roger Kimball:

Again, it would be wrong to infer that the so-called stimulus package was
for naught. It really is bearing fruit. It’s just not the fruit that Obama
promised. To appreciate this, you have to understand what the real — as distinct
from the announced — purposed of the stimulus package was. It was not, as Sowell
points out, “to get that money out into the economy as fast as possible.” On the contrary, the real purpose, Sowell explains,

was to get that money — and the power that goes with it — into the
hands of the government. Power is what politics is all about.


More money and power in the hands of government officials, less money
and power in the hands of individuals. That’s the real Obama ticket. Or, rather,
it’s part of the real Obama ticket. For what we seeing playing out in domestic
affairs is also going on in the international arena. What Obama is doing to us
as individuals he is also endeavoring to do to America as a whole: to render it
less powerful, less “exceptional,” more part of a housebroken collective.

For all of Obama's lofty words, he is not about 'power to the people.' Barack Obama is about 'power to the central government.' Since the stimulus passed the only segment of society that has grown is government. For the rest of America, the crisis has deepened and there is no end in sight. In turn, more Americans are becoming dependent on the government. Unintended consequences? Hardly.

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